Publishing life cycle: promotion
From submitting funding proposals and conducting research to writing up results and developing insights, it’s easy to feel like publication marks the end point of a long process. As with any work that hopes to engage with a broader audience, however—generating interaction and feedback, contributing to and furthering fields of research—, publication marks the start of your work’s real impact.
As an author, it’s vital that you too contribute to this promotion. Interacting with the broader research community, and embracing the digital landscape of scholarly publishing, our journals provide you with opportunities to capitalize on and further drive engagement with your articles pre- and post-publication. Our recommendations provide you with time-efficient and effective ways to do this.
| Pre-publication | Post-publication |
Pre-publication
The sooner your work is visible, the sooner it can generate engagement, feedback, and citations. Operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution, bioRxiv is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. Upload your unreviewed manuscript to make your findings immediately available to the research community. Our journals accept manuscript submissions directly from bioRxiv (via the B2J service). The transmitting of manuscripts is quick and easy, requiring only minimal input from authors.
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Plan ahead
The time between acceptance and final publication represents the ideal opportunity to prepare for sharing your work. Now that you know your article’s going to be published, take positive steps to ensure that it speaks to the widest possible audience. Get ahead with the following three recommendations. Upon acceptance, make sure to share these items with our Production Team, too, so that we can easily combine our promotional efforts.
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Write a tweetable abstract
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Compose your posts |
Write a lay summary |
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Successfully condensing your abstract to a sentence or two isn’t easy. Capturing your work succinctly, ensuring that keywords are included while still making for an engaging outline, can be the difference between someone reading your work and scanning past it. Creating a tweetable abstract makes sharing your work on social media all the more effective.
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Drafting your promotional posts for social media, complete with relevant handles and hashtags, means that you can move quickly on publication. Along with our automated email alerts for newly published articles and our own Marketing Team’s social media posts, coordinated activity helps make the most of your publication.
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Lay summaries are perfect for communicating with audiences outside of your article’s specialist research area, aiding broader dissemination of your publication. A summary of your work in plain, digestible language is useful for a range of communications: relevant emails, presentations at conferences and events, even verbally outlining your work to members of the research community and other potential readers. |
See Post-publication below for more on social media.
Post-publication
Social media
Whether Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn, social media platforms (Twitter especially) are increasingly important modes of communication for researchers. Discovering new research and reviews, interacting directly with fellow authors, driving conversations and stoking debate: social media represents a vital resource and tool for researchers and readers alike.
Between contributing authors and affiliated institutions, published papers generally have some association with and access to social media accounts. In the event that you don’t have your own account, make the most of your personal and professional relationships. Asking your affiliated institution(s) and co-authors to post about your paper, should they have accounts, can dramatically increase its exposure. It equally speaks to the collaborative nature of research projects.
As with most promotional activity, timing is all-important. We recommend promoting your paper on social media as soon as your final Version of Record is published, including a link to it on our relevant journal website.
Top tips for Tweeting
Altmetric
Altmetric track all of our published articles, meaning you can immediately monitor engagement with your work. Embedded directly into our online article pages, an Altmetric Article Details Page provides you with a complete overview and breakdown of how and where your article is being talked about, enabling you to identify the most relevant channels for outreach. More than this, you can also see exactly who is engaging with your work, allowing you to engage directly with your audiences, drive conversation, and scope potential collaborators. All of this makes it easy to demonstrate the full impact of your work to funders and review panels, beyond the traditional citation measures.
| Altmetric |
Share
In addition to social media, it’s important to share your work with colleagues and fellow researchers. Send personal emails announcing the publication of your work, linking to your article online (full access to which will depend on institutional subscriptions). Equally, think about leveraging the expertise and resources of affiliated librarian(s), who might be able to highlight your publication through other communicative means—an institution-wide email announcement or newsletter, for instance.
It’s also worth forming a list of key influencers in relation to your article. Where there’s value, our Publishing Team will consider exclusive free access to your article for identified individuals, limited to a set time period.
Present your work
Conferences and events are the perfect forums for amplifying your work.
Verbal and visual renderings of your work help to reach audiences that written accounts might not achieve in isolation. Speaking at conferences and events presents your work in the broader context of your field and can equally attract engagement from other interdisciplinary areas. Take any and every opportunity to talk about your work publicly.
The Biochemical Society provides an extensive range of events, including scientific conferences, training events, outreach activities, medal lectures, and policy and education events. Submit an abstract for consideration as an oral communication or poster presentation and share your work with the wider community.
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Handles
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Hashtags |
Images
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Including relevant handles in your post is one of the more effective ways to boost your work’s exposure. These might include other contributing authors’ handles as well as relevant institutions’ and labs’. Tagging in this way makes it easy for included parties to Retweet your original post, in which case your promoted work will reach a far larger volume of followers and potential readers. Don’t forget to @PPPublishing so that we can easily Retweet your post to our own followers too. |
Hashtags offer important search functionality for Twitter users and, used effectively, provide complementary context for your work. Focus on a few keywords relating to your work—for instance, its field of research or specialism. Also, be sure to include our respective journal title and hashtag so that readers searching: Biochemical Journal/#biochemj (for example) will easily find your work.
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An image speaks volumes. If your published paper includes figures—use them. A good visual will help attract attention to your post, generating interest in your paper.
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ScienceOpen
For articles published in Neuronal Signaling only, ScienceOpen offers effective ways to increase engagement with your work.
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ScienceOpen is a freely accessible search and discovery platform that puts research in context. Smart filters, topical collections, and input from the academic community help you to find the most relevant articles in your field and beyond.
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You can help increase the discoverability of your research. Write a non-specialist author summary to make it more accessible to wider audiences.
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Set up a personal profile based on your ORCID ID and network with other scientists. View the impact of your research through citations, altmetrics, usage numbers, shares, and more.
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Read more about the range of tools available for researchers, including editing your own collections, reviewing other articles and inviting researchers to review yours, plus a variety of other networking opportunities. |
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| Submission | Peer review | Publication | Promotion |
Language-editing services
- To support our global author community, Portland Press has partnered with the Charlesworth Group to offer authors a 10% discount on their Charlesworth Author Services. Visit their website > or 请访问我们的中文网
For further information, please contact:
- The Editorial Office for information on preparation, submission or peer review of articles.
- The Production Team for information post-acceptance of an article and production queries.
- The Marketing Team for guidance on promotion of your paper.
